Well the month has gone by and we have another contest winner. They have won the Griffin iTrip Auto! All they had to do was subscribe to my RSS feed via e-mail. If you have won you have been notified via e-mail. Thanks to everyone that participated and stay tuned for another contest really soon! Also if you have any ideas for contest prizes please let me know.
Talking about contests I wanted to let everyone know about the contest that is going on over at ThinkComputers. We have teamed up with NZXT to give away one of their newest cases the Tempest. The contest is being run on the ThinkComputers Forums, which are free to join so head on over there are check it out, there is about 10 days left in the contest.
Well I’m off to the Penguins game, it is about the 4th or 5th game I have gone to this season. Hockey games are always best towards the end of the season because teams are trying to make the playoffs and play really hard. The Penguins have already made the playoffs, but are trying to get first place in the division so they get home ice advantage. We are playing the Rangers, who always seem to get the best of us for some reason. Hopefully the pens play a good game, game starts at 12:30 so I’m out of here!
I showed you guys some pictures of the new place about a month ago. I have been so busy over the past few weeks that I haven’t had time to take pictures of the new place, but I promised I would do a before and after. I really like the new place, even more than the old place. The only thing that I really miss is the garage I had at the old place. Location-wise this place is about 30 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh, but is almost 45 minutes away from my parent’s house, compared to the 15 minutes it was before. This place is very different from most of the places that I have lived in before, hopefully I won’t get bored of it and move again in a year!
Starting off is the living room where we have the HUGE couch.
Behind the living room we have a small table and the large kitchen. I really like the kitchen because it is not a galley kitchen and the bay window brings a lot of light into the kitchen. Also there are accent lights on top of the cabinets that really light things up.
The bedroom is pretty plain, not much in there because we do not spend a lot of time in there.
There are 2 bathrooms a smaller one and a larger one that has a Jacuzzi tub. The Jacuzzi tub is great for relaxing after a stressful day.
The second bedroom is used as an office. There is a nice big window that lights up the room and each bedroom has skylights. Also each bedroom has a loft space, this is great since I no longer have a garage. As you can see I have a ton of boxes up there!
We also have a nice large deck area, this is something I really missed at the old place. I am hoping to get a nice table out there so in the summer I can sit outside on my laptop.
Some of you may have noticed that all of my sites were down including this one was down for some time early in the morning yesterday. I was having problems with e-mail so I decided to just restart the server. Well it did not come back up. I couldn’t figure out why it would not come back up. I have my servers in a local data center about 35 minutes from my house. I talked to the guys down there and they said the server was on and running. So there had to be a problem and I was going to head down there and check it out. Right before I left they hooked up a console to the server and noticed it was stopped at the BIOS and they just had to hit F1 for the sever to initialize. This is the first time my sites have been down in a while and it opened my eyes to a lot.
Downtime means you are loosing money
The title pretty much explains it, if your site is down you are loosing money. That’s the only downfall of working online, if you have server problems you lose money. This really became apparent to me because this is the first time my site has gone down since it became my full time job. Since my websites are my only source of income any down time costs me money. Also if people see that it is down they might not come back, and if sponsors see that it’s down they will think that we are unprofessional.
Reliable Web Hosting
Reliable web hosting is something that you are going to want to have. Say you hit the front page of Digg and your site goes down, imagine the money that you could have made. I have had a few different front page Digg’s for a few of my sites and I would rather have had the boost in revenue then none at all. As I said my servers are hosted in a data center so I don’t deal with a hosting company. If anyone knows a good hosting company please post it below in the comments.
Being Knowledgeable About your Server
My servers run on Linux, but I really do not know that much about it. Every time there is a problem I can’t go off asking someone how to fix it. If you are running your own servers be sure to know what you doing and know the basic commands to stop and start services. If you are being hosted by someone else make sure you understand the control panel and know how to fix things if they go wrong. If you are lazy you can hire a server admin, but of course that costs money.
Access to the Server 24/7
Whether its web hosting or server hosting you need to have access to someone that can troubleshoot the problem 24/7. If your site goes down at 2AM you want it back up ASAP, you don’t want to have to wait till 9AM when the help desk opens back up. Also I would suggest finding a host that has a technical support line. I don’t like the idea of me e-mailing or submitting a help ticket (which is basically like e-mail) and waiting for them to get back to me. If there is a problem I want to talk to someone as soon as I see the problem. Also if you are hosting your servers somewhere you want to make it local so if there is a serious problem you can go to the data center and fix it yourself.
If you are running a successful website you don’t want it to go down so make sure you research your hosting options.
Everyone wants to make money online, but to many people think that it is simple, that you can just make a site, put up ads and you will be making a ton of money. As much as we wish it was the case that is not how it works. Anyone can make money online, but making a living online takes a lot of time and hard work. Time is something that a lot of people do not have, they work 9-5 jobs and when they get home all they want to do is lay down. Also if you are already making a living online and want to make more money it is hard to devote the time to a new project. That is the case with me, but I have found ways to make hundreds extra each month without taking away from working full time on ThinkComputers. Here are some of the methods that I have used to make this extra money.
Content Sites & SEO
You may be thinking wait isn’t ThinkComputers a content site? Yes it is, but it is one of my sites that I constantly update and work on everyday. These content sites that you make are not meant to be updated everyday. Depending on the topic they can be updated weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. These content sites are made as a resource for people to find information so you can either make up the content yourself or find a script that will auto-build a content site. If you are not following me an example of a content site would be a fan site for a band or a site about sleeping problems. So you make the site, slap up some ads, then you are ready to get some traffic to the site. If you have good SEO skills you can drive traffic to your site, but you can also buy traffic. These sites are not made to make that much money, but if you make a lot of these sites you can be pulling in some nice extra cash each month, and these sites only take a few hours to put together. If you want to learn about SEO check out whoisseo.com, I have learned a lot from that site.
Adsense Arbitrage
Arbitrage is not talked about that much anymore, but a lot of people still use it to make extra money. If you do not understand what arbitrage is check out my post I made about it back in January. Basically arbitrage is taking advantage of a market imbalance. So the way this works with online advertising is you have a content site with a high paying keyword, let’s say Viagra. You then buy an adwords campaign for that keyword. If you have done it correctly the ads you have placed on the site should make at least 3x of what you have put into the adwords campaign. Adsense arbitrage does take some research, but you can really make a lot of money doing it. I know some people that spend thousands a day on adwords campaigns.
Blogging
Blogging has to be one of the easiest ways to make some extra money. Setting up a blog is really easy and if you can take 30 minutes a day to write a post you will have a successful blog. There are so many opportunities out there for bloggers it is hard not to make a little extra cash.
Surveys
Online surveys are a great way to make extra money. The hard thing about it is finding survey companies that actually payout, there are so many scams out there. Also there are a lot of survey companies that will never send you a single survey, they just get your information. Moms Cash Blog told me about Survey Savy and I’ve had a lot of success with it, and have actually got paid! If you can get enough surveys done each month you can make anywhere from $100 – $500 a month.
Affiliate Marketing and PPC
Out of all of the ways to make some extra money affiliate marketing has to be one of the toughest. The thing about affiliate marketing is that it takes a lot of research and trial and error. What you want to do is sign up for an affiliate network, I suggest Azoogle Ads. Then you need to research a niche and find a good offer and promote it. This may sound easy, but it takes a lot of research. I have only started in affiliate marketing, if you want to learn more about it check out Zac Johnson’s blog or UberAffiliate. These guys are making a lot of money through affiliate marketing.
These are some of the ways you can make some extra money online, but there are a lot more out there. A lot of these methods are helpful for people who have a full time job and want to get into making money online.
I wanted to take the time to wish all of the readers of my blog a very Happy Easter. I hope you all have nice dinners with you families. I will be spending most of the day at my parent’s house. Since I now live further away from my parents it is nice to take a day and go over there and visit with all of them, especially my niece Aalyiah, she is now 14 months old. She has grown so much over the past few months, and she is now learning to talk…well just a few words.
I haven’t really talked about it since I launched the contest, but the Griffin iTrip Auto contest is still going on, there is about a week left. The iTrip Auto is a really cool accessory to have for your iPod. I have one in my car right now. Anyways, all you have to do to be entered in the contest is to subscribe to my RSS feed via e-mail, that will give you one entry. If you want 2 more entries all you have to do is make a blog post about the contest linking back to the contest and BobBuskirk.com. So in total you can have 3 entries into the contest. If you are not subscribed via e-mail you can do that below.
Also I am thinking about another contest for next month. If anyone has any ideas on prizes or what type of contest let me know. Happy Easter everyone!
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